December 9, 2022 8:03 pm
Russia’s deputy foreign minister and the US embassy in Ankara said diplomats from Russia and the United States met today in Istanbul on Friday to discuss a number of technical issues in relations between the two countries.
A US embassy spokesman said the meeting did not address the crisis in Ukraine.
Russia’s state-run Tass news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying the two sides would discuss a number of “difficult issues,” including entry visas, the number of staff at their embassies, the work of institutions and each side’s agencies overseas, including a number of other issues.
Ryabkov said the meeting took place between the heads of departments of the two countries’ foreign ministries, in what Russia’s state news agencies described as a relatively low-level meeting. Ryabkov added that the meeting should not be seen as a sign that the two sides are ready to resume talks on “big issues”.
A spokesman for the US embassy in Ankara confirmed the meeting and said, “A senior State Department official was in Istanbul to meet with Russian negotiators on a limited set of bilateral issues.”
“There was no discussion” of the Ukrainian crisis, he added.
In recent years, the Russian embassy in Washington and the US embassy in Moscow have significantly reduced their staff amid a series of reciprocal measures that have seen scores of American and Russian diplomats return to their countries.
Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, met with William Burns, director of the CIA, in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on November 14, which is the highest-level face-to-face meeting between the two sides since the beginning of the Russian operation in Ukraine last February.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Tass contacts between the intelligence services are limited to exchanging information and did not address the state of bilateral relations between the two countries in general.
Late last November, Russia withdrew from a meeting scheduled to take place in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to discuss the resumption of nuclear weapons inspections under the New START Agreement.
Source: Reuters
